


And You Give Yourself Away

by theoldgods



Category: The Americans (TV 2013)
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Identity Issues, Missing Scene, Parenthood, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Psychological Trauma, Yuletide, Yuletide 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-17 23:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16983747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/pseuds/theoldgods
Summary: Paige will never be hungry as Philip was as a child, but as the Jennings family implodes, food often feels like the only thing she doesn't lack.





	And You Give Yourself Away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [intrikate88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/gifts).



> Written for intrikate88 for Yuletide 2018! Happy Yuletide to all.
> 
> Contains spoilers for the entire series, including the finale. Title is, of course, from [U2's "With or Without You."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFqVLhoxuVo)

**1967**

Philip never pictured a child of his own, not even when Zhukov took him back to meet the woman who would be Elizabeth Jennings, whose eyes burned into him from their first glance. Zhukov had told them that very day exactly what would be expected, all the layers of the act they would need to perform, including parenthood. Elizabeth’s body was immediate, the nearness of her a dangerously wonderful warmth pouring like tea into his stomach, but their child remained a mission statement even in the strained, bitter months after conception.

On the day of delivery Philip paces the waiting room like every other expectant father—he does not know whether this is a thing that Soviet fathers do, what his own father did for him, and now he supposes he never will—and is rewarded with a bundle whose scent reminds him of Elizabeth, on that first evening when they’d lain as far away from one another as the motel bed would allow and her heat had drifted across to him. Minutes after birth, his daughter is remarkably still in his hands.

Elizabeth, sitting upright with her knuckles tensed around the bed’s railings, looks more uncertain than he’s ever seen her, and his stomach prickles as it has every day of her pregnancy. He focuses on the snuffling creature in his arms— _their_ daughter, fully separate from Elizabeth’s body, her own being at last—and touches a finger to her cheek.

They’re alone, the three of them, not a nurse in sight, and the utter absurdity of the situation makes him laugh.

“Paige.” The most American name either of them could stand, one they couldn’t apply a Russian diminutive to even by accident. Babies are babies, surely, and yet she’s a happy alien to the world he thought he knew: She’s solid and warm and may never know a single day of hunger. He kisses his girl on her forehead. “ _Privyet_.”

Elizabeth’s eyes widen in her sweaty face, but her grip on the bed loosens and she leans back against the pillows with a soft mouth that makes Philip smile.

* * *

**1987-88**

Taking the bottle with her is so pathetic that Paige can hear her mother— _Nadezhda now?_ she wonders as she descends Claudia’s staircase—scold her. For a moment, clutching the vodka to her chest under her jacket, Paige marshals counterarguments, but she has nothing to excuse a slip in procedure, any more than she has anywhere to go or anyone to turn to aside from the man who cornered her in a parking garage with a gun.

She drinks straight from the bottle, returns upstairs, wipes it of prints, and nestles it back into Claudia’s freezer before heading to Stan’s.

The FBI interrogates her for somewhere between a week and a month, and when she’s not in a room with two men who are not Stan Beeman, she’s in an FBI safehouse. The questions themselves she honestly doesn’t remember much of—everything is fuzzy around the edges, as if she _had_ taken every shot of vodka available to her, every day, a dreamy concentration that evens out into nothingness. She cries as much as she can force herself to do, picturing her parents’ horrified faces staring back at her from within the train, but the only emotion they raise in her is a faintly nauseous guilt. For real tears she has to think of Henry instead.

At some point there are fewer questions than breaks, and one evening, after two hours spent alone in an interrogation room with only her thoughts for company, a brisk secretary hands her the keys to her apartment. She stares at them until a hand settles on her shoulder.

“Uncle Sam’s finished with your apartment and no longer considers you a flight risk. For now.”

Stan says nothing else, just nods jerkily and continues down the hall, but his pitying eyes send her heart into her throat.

Paige celebrates her probation by buying one bottle of vodka and one of olive oil and opening neither.

* * *

**1975**

Paige’s first serious trouble at school comes in the first grade, and Philip waits until he’s collected her from the principal’s office and they’ve left the building before he starts to laugh.

“Daddy!”

Paige looks frantically around to see who’s watching as he, still chortling, bundles her into the station wagon.

“Would you like me to be very angry with you?”

“I _hit_ him!”

“Yes, I suppose that’s bad.” Philip grins as he eases the car into reverse, catching sight in the rearview mirror of Paige’s defiantly red cheeks and mussed bangs. The righteous rage and confusion roiling off of her reminds him of her mother just the night before, her arms wrapped around the throat of a customs agent, and the two images sit horrendously easily next to each other in his brain. He swallows before continuing. “Hitting is not something you should do lightly, Paige.”

She waits until they’re halfway home before speaking further.

“He wouldn’t stop pinching Sarah.”

Philip flexes the fingers of one hand. “Did you tell Mrs. Wheeler?”

“She doesn’t care if Billy is bad.”

“But did you tell her?”

Paige’s sigh comes from a teenager instead of a seven year old. “Not today.”

Philip takes a few breaths and changes lanes properly before asking the obvious. “But you did before?”

“I _said_ , she doesn’t care if Billy is bad if it’s only a little pinch.” Paige’s face is ferocious now, and Philip bites his lip to stop smiling. “So today when he did it I hit his arm. It wasn’t _hard_.”

“Teachers and adults are there so you don’t have to hit other people to get problems solved. It certainly isn’t fair to hit people for nothing.” The words roll automatically off his tongue, though they would have meant nothing to a young Mischa or his classmates. He hesitates. “It also isn’t fair to pinch people. And sometimes...sometimes adults screw up.”

Paige is quiet, her head lolling against the seat though she looks anything but tired. When they pull into the driveway she sits up straight to unbuckle her seatbelt and their eyes—his eyes and his wife’s eyes, in miniature—meet.

Philip shivers as he opens his door.

* * *

**1991**

She transfers to NYU for her last two years of college and graduates only a year after she would have, the parade of job interviews in her last semester as much of a blur as being interrogated by the FBI. By graduation weekend itself she’s already moved into a basically inhabitable studio in Brooklyn and begun work at the alt weekly a professor had suggested. It’s not a bad gig, objectively speaking, and the endless researching of New York’s mundanely dirty deeds can keep her distracted for eight (or ten, or twelve) hours a day.

When her diploma comes in the mail, late in the summer, Paige tosses it onto the counter and cleans around it for a week before her sloppiness bores her. She picks it up to reveal a small unaddressed envelope stuck beneath.

Things were quite effectively covered up, all things considered, in the DC area. Embezzlement and fraud were commonplace enough crimes in 1987, and Elizabeth and Philip Jennings had never had a wide enough social circle to notice if they were never released from a prison. Sarah Williams has lovely ginger hair and a life as solid as the US federal government can manage, with only a passing interest in the collapse of the Berlin Wall a year and half before. She is utterly unremarkable in New York City.

Paige stares at the envelope until her eyes begin to water, at which point she uses a dirty paring knife to cautiously pry it open. The note inside is four words, in a handwriting she hasn’t seen in nearly four years.

_I just can’t yet._

He still goes by Henry, as far as she knows. Stan’s last communique, at Christmas, had suggested he’d settled well into MIT. Paige had told Stan to tell Henry whatever news about her he thought best.

She finishes eating dinner and takes a dose and a half of Benedryl to knock herself out. Before work in the morning she buys a copy of the _Times_ and does not noticeably blanch at “GORBACHEV IS OUSTED IN AN APPARENT COUP.”

* * *

**1983**

His daughter’s resemblance to his wife becomes depressing in the days after. Curled along her bed with her back to them, her mind probably running a thousand miles an hour through every interaction they’ve ever had as a family, Paige _is_ Elizabeth. And while Elizabeth wears wariness, endless suspicion, as a second skin, just as he does, his Paige has disappeared within it.

 _She’s only a year younger than you were when you joined_ , Philip reminds himself when he lies awake at night, ignoring the equally conscious Elizabeth next to him. But in American years it all seems laughable.

After a few days Elizabeth returns to her normal patterns, the corners of her eyes relaxing enough to let him know she’s reached a detente with their dangerous child. They’re drifting slowly into sleep when he asks the question.

“Are you sure?”

Elizabeth pulls her head away so that her hair no longer falls against his arm, her body heat dissipating. She does not look at him, though her voice is faintly hopeful.

“Things seem...possible.”

Paige had looked at him that morning, over their cereal, the first real glance they’d shared since. Elizabeth was upstairs hassling Henry, the world nearly familiar for a moment. Paige had dipped her head—ashamed? He could no longer read so much of her face—and asked him to speak Russian.

The startled _Ya lyublyu tebya_ that was his first thought in response had stuck halfway up his throat, leaving him gawping like a fish, one hand partially extended, until Henry came clattering downstairs and Paige turned away, her eyes dull.

Philip grunts and wraps an arm around his waist to stop himself reaching out for Elizabeth too.

“I hope so.”

* * *

**1991**

Paige thanks God, a sincere whispered prayer as she hasn’t done in years, that the death stroke is on December 26, when she isn’t expected to appear in the newsroom. Despite being the junior member of the team, she’s been given three days off for Christmas, and she ignores her home phone when it rings just before 5pm.

_You’ve reached Sarah Williams; please leave a message and I’ll get back to you when I can._

“Sarah! Gerry’s letting us out at 6. You’re still in town, right? Moscow mules and black Russians all night! We—”

In the background someone is butchering the Soviet anthem, loudly and not entirely soberly, and she stares at the ceiling, counting in shaky Russian until the message cuts off.

She’s been following the news in earnest for the past week; this is a formality. But it’s gone, just like that, the boogeyman of their collective childhood and the nightmare normality of her very specific adolescence. Anyone with half a brain could have felt the inexorable pull toward _something_ , these last months, and yet the fact that the Soviet Union is actually no more seems nearly as ridiculous as America itself ceasing to exist. She half expects to wake up tomorrow to see that this has been a fever dream, but so much of her reality has been factually absurd; this is really no different.

Two days before she’d been walking past a liquor store when instinct took over. She gets up now to open her freezer and stare at the vodka within. Half of New York’s twenty-somethings will be raising an ironic glass to the defeated motherland tonight, though she bets she’s the only one mixing hers with shots of olive oil.

It takes her about half an hour to feel woozy, despite the oil; her quicksilver vodka brain curses Claudia for a liar, and she knows she’s properly drunk because the mental picture she gets, of Claudia and her mother hanging laughing all over the furniture in Claudia’s apartment, is both intensely sharp and not immediately painful. She leans back against the couch and lets a few further associations flow free, as she’s done only once before: Henry squabbling over a bowl of cereal, her mother’s eyes gleaming with pride over the improvised punching bag in the garage, her father laughing as she nearly T-bones their own garage with the Camaro.

Her _wanting_ surprises her. Never, in the four years since she left her parents aboard a train at the Canadian border, has she wanted to see them and ask _what next?_ like she does in this moment; the questions, on the few times she’s allowed herself to wallow in them, are usually _why?_ or, in her angriest moments, _how fucking dare you?_ They’ve lost in the end; all of their years in America, creating Paige and Henry, playing with whatever fake-real family they had, were for nothing, and they cut and ran, let Paige herself step off a train and into oblivion, for that nothing. Their own daughter, and they let her go, chose one another and a _cause_ that no longer exists over her.

She hopes they’re as tormented with their lost children as their children are with them, hopes that with no wall or great Soviet Socialist Republic in the way anymore they can hear her curse them from across the Atlantic.

* * *

**1987**

Paige stops by the house to ask him to spar with her the day after he embarrasses himself by losing all control in her apartment, and he feels his temper, hair-trigger already thanks to Kimmy, rise. He breathes in deeply, watching her watch him, until he can speak sensibly.

“Was being choked out not enough, for you?”

Her face is pale, though her gaze is steady. “It sucked, Dad. That’s why I have to do it again.”

Philip laughs, not as nastily as he would like. “I want to believe you’re not serious.”

“You’ve always wanted that.”

“I’ve always wanted to keep my daughter from being killed, yes.” He clenches a fist and lets her see him do it. “Even more than that, I’ve wanted to keep you from being hurt.”

Paige’s nostrils flare. “And it’s already too late for that.”

For a fleeting second his gorge rises nearly to the back of his mouth, and he bites on his tongue to keep himself from gagging. “Yes.” When she raises an eyebrow, he continues, “I’ve had absolutely no choice in almost every decision I’ve ever made. And when you were born I knew you, if nothing else, would never be hungry as we had, thanks to this godforsaken country and the decisions that put me here. You have to hurt. You _don’t_ have to risk your life like your mother and me.”

“I have to do something _good_ ,” Paige says, her eyes wild now with Elizabeth’s fervor, yes, but also what he hopes to hell isn’t his own despair. “Meaningful. And I truly think the cause can do _something_.”

Had he ever thought that himself? Mischa’s thoughts and feelings live behind a veil that’s become solid fabric over the years, and while he joined the KGB for many reasons, _the cause_ was probably never first.

 _This isn’t a game_ , he wants to tell her, for the thousandth time. She knows that by now, surely, but Soviet notions of a cause, total commitment that cannot be escaped even in death, can only ever be half-understood by his all-American girl, no matter how Russian her blood is. He and Elizabeth must think only of staying here as long as they can, of bringing Paige and Henry safely back with them when it’s time to go, but if he lets himself dream he cannot see Paige wandering Moscow, cannot hear her speak a word of Russian.

“This isn’t the only way to serve,” he says finally. “And it can’t be undone.” He clears his throat. “Please.”

He goes upstairs before she can answer.

* * *

**1997**

When the second envelope arrives, Paige is, in some bizarre way, waiting. It’s been almost ten years, and she’s written at least that many letters before shredding them, assuming that there is no way the FBI would miss her sending mail to the Russian Federation. Her leash, postcollapse, is only slightly longer than it was before.

Nonetheless, her heart flips at the sight of that curious blank slid in amongst her mail, so like the first. Henry has remained quiet—one letter a year after the collapse, each properly addressed and dated, wishing her well and little more. Occasional words on his career or his fiancee filtering through her FBI babysitters. She’s ready for more.

She pries the letter open, her vision blurring the further down the page she reads.

_My little tiger: An old friend is making the rounds…_

She does not believe Gabriel is still alive, not while reading his short paragraphs and not while waiting, barely stopping herself from casing each passerby, at the address supplied.

“You weren’t followed,” he assures her when a doorman has let her inside, his rich voice exactly as she remembers and twice as strong as his wrinkled body. “Well, not by them. Nice hair.”

His wink startles her into a singular loud sob. He leads her to a table and offers her a handkerchief, his own eyes glistening.

“Why?” she whispers eventually.

“We didn’t abandon you, little one. Not entirely. It _was_ touch and go there for a bit, after ‘91.”

“You weren’t purged?”

Paige almost apologizes as soon as the words leave her mouth, though she loses her fear when Gabriel laughs.

“Somehow not. I am just a weak old man in Moscow, though I have more strength outside the city. I wanted to see you before I left.”

He hesitates, and Paige realizes the end of the sentence is not simply _New York_. She’s had enough time to turn her memories, including Gabriel, over and over until they’re threadbare, and finds that, after all this, the end of his long life is gray nothing to her.

“Well, here I am.”

Her heart is thudding so loudly she’s surprised it doesn’t ping across the table. He watches her, interlacing his long fingers, before speaking.

“And do you want to know?”

Until this moment she’s never considered the possibility that they could be anything other than infuriatingly healthy and hale, possibly even happy from time to time, as they at least had one another. She forces her words through numb lips.

“You’ve seen them. A lot.”

“Every few years.” Gabriel tilts his head. “You will not believe anything I say.”

“No,” Paige agrees. “I cannot believe anything about them ever again.”

“Can you believe that they love you?”

Paige, shivering, wipes the corner of her eye. “Unfortunately, yes.”

Gabriel smiles.

“That is enough. They are despicably healthy. Like you, they will never be truly whole or happy again. And they _do_ love you, little though it means. If you are ever ready, they will be too.”

* * *

**1999**

He’s been in Moscow for twelve years, and his blood is still American-thin when it comes to the cold. He and Nadya cling to one another in the long December nights, burying themselves in each other’s heat. They’ve been silent all morning, reading and drinking tea, when a knock comes at the door.

It’s one of Gabriel’s messengers, rarely seen since Gabriel was laid to rest over the summer and the Center went quiet again. He nods brusquely at Mischa.

“From the bank,” he says, offering a crumpled envelope.

Nadya’s hearing is as good as it ever was, despite her silver hair. She’s beside him before Mischa can finish closing the door.

“Open it,” she whispers. Mischa’s fingers tremble as he breaks the seal. He pauses until she covers his hand with hers, her ring cold against his skin. “ _Mischa_.”

He unfolds the paper within—a single sheet, American stock, black ballpoint. The greeting, in poorly formed Cyrillic, makes him bite down on a knuckle to stop himself from crying out.

_Privyet._

Nadya rests her chin on his shoulder and leans in to read, her thumb soothing his neck as he takes shuddering breaths. They absorb the remaining English words together.

_I thought my life would begin again at some point, and then I’d know what to say. It never will. You are always here, haunting me, no matter what I do or don’t do. I believe that you tried your best with a mission you could never complete, but sometimes nothing is good enough, and sometimes everyone loses. And I think you know that, probably better than I do._

_In this new millennium I think I’m ready to listen, if you are._

**Author's Note:**

>  _Privyet_ : Hi  
>  _Ya lyublyu tebya_ : I love you
> 
> “Gorbachev Is Ousted in an Apparent Coup" is [an actual NYT headline](https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/19/world/soviet-crisis-gorbachev-ousted-apparent-coup-soviet-armed-forces-hard-liners.html) from August 19, 1991, though [that particular coup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat_attempt) didn't quite take.


End file.
